3 Oct

/ by Bassam

We’re finally in the driver seat! Yesterday, Ton and I went over a list of to do items for the animation features needed for project orange. Today, he committed IPO drivers in blender (the top of the list).

Currently this is limited to using object transformation or bone poses to drive any IPO curve you want.

Here’s a rather boring little video showing this feature in action: face-slider test. As you can see it’s incredibly useful to have a 2D slider controling 4 different facial shapes at once.

Continuing the test, I added more controls to the face, and now the setup looks like this:
The pose you see in this screenshot is entirely made with the custom controllers.

Further, you can replace the custom controller with a bone; use bone rotations to drive shapes for automatic muscle bulges, flesh compression or even cloth wrinkles. Andy made a nice little test anim to show cloth wrinkling and twisting as the character moves his arm.

[edit] ok, as promised, here’s the .blend file for the scene… again, you need the most current cvs to run this – and there are a couple of wrinkles with actions and drivers yet- they’ll probably be fixed very soon, but they might mean you have to choose between normal armature animation and drivers for now: driver controller test file

[edit] Ton fixed the updating problem for bone drivers.. the jaw/look and eyelid controllers should work fine now, including live updating in the viewport.

Hi guys… I saved a new video using avidemux instead of mencoder, it seems to save the avi correctly. The video is actually newer and shows more than one slider in action.
A nice thing about these custom 3D window sliders is that they update live while you work, a big improvement over the buttons/action window ones.

I paid Orange a little visit on friday.
The characters look really good in the current stage. Still to be done are textures, but already they have a good character. They are alive so to speak.
I think Orange took a wise decicision not to go for the final-fantasy trap to try to recreate humans. In my opinion andy got the right tone between cartoon and real.

Because of the slow start (thanks to script and hardware) the first animatic could have used a bit more time but already shows very well what will and will not work in the story. I was very impressed by basse power to animate so much emotion in such little material.
It’s a very powerfull team. Although maybe need to grow towards each other just a bit more to become more of a team. But hee, it’s an international team; together for barely 6 weeks, mostly non-native english speakers. And since when are (computer) artists verbaly strong anyway? There must be some troubles getting the emotions across there somewhere. This will, in my opinion, have a strong impact on the visual language used in the movie, for the better. But also in visualy telling the story as to verbaly telling the story.

They’ll have very little time getting a presentation on the bconf at a level they might want, because you can’t have 20% of a movie finished at 20% of the timespan, that’s not how it works.

In conclusion; Very promising stuff, good work guys!

Fab said on 3 Oct, 2005:

Wow!
(btw, you can open gizmo.avi with an hex editor and replace strings “FMP4″ whit “DIVX”, this makes also gspot happy :) )

Vassilios Boucer said on 3 Oct, 2005:

What a Development!!!!…every Day a New Feature!
Congratulations again to all Developers …and many many THANKS for this AMAZING 3D Application! I also hope all these goodies will be in the next version of Blender NEW 2.40!

Gabio said on 3 Oct, 2005:

Joeri: The spy of the community. ;)

Based on what joeri said, you project is comming along well.
Very nice use of driven ipo.

Joeri, we’re working on it :) I think there are some improvements already, but as you say, we’re slightly hampered until we get a finished script. We’ve also got a tentative plan to go out this weekend with a camera and film the entire thing with two of us acting in the vondelpark, with (hopefully) similar camera angles/shots as planned for the final. If it isn’t helpful to us, at least it should provide ridiculous material for the making-of ;)
anyway, thanks for both nice comments and insightful criticism, it was great seeing you last week.

…I’m not too keen about Alias and AutoDesk getting bothered by us… they’re rich…and very powerful….eating in on their turf with a free tool getting so powerful – will be sure to prepare their lawyers. I guess they’re sharpening their pencils as we type, it’s a matter of time before they’ll be over Blender like a hawk and sue BF to smitherines.

It’s important that we focus on original content and make the tool different from these, otherwise…we won’t survive a lawyer attack – believe me…the day WILL come.

I don’t mean to upset anyone – Just worried about my favorite tool (and livelyhood) to the extent that I actually have nightmares about it. Blender it’s such a good thing that I’d hate for this to happen. Knowing Blender as well as I do….Knowing 3dstudio max as well as I do….I know this will happen….unfortunately.. It’s just a matter of time.

Tell you the truth….I hope I’m just being paranoid – and my worst-case-scenario never happens – and we all Blend on happily.

Well Alias and other major players has something that Blender does not which is software support. I know, I know the entire community itself is the support but its nothing like being able to pay the developers to give you extra attention. As far as Blender concerns i think we should keep an eye on what software inventions Alias and Softimage etc. have so we dont just rip them of totally. I beleive they have patents on some of their technology and it could be a legal issue. Whatever happened to Moonlight3D? I think there were something going on because it was so similar to SI3D that it was scary, I might be crazy though.

But yeah I´ve been thinking the same specially when Blender gets fluids effects because that requires the unlimited license and if Blender gets better dynamics such as hair,fluids etc. a cg workshop might not need those special extra if they can be similar achieved in Blender and with the entire source available not only the API or scripting it is very expandable and competetive.

pofo said on 3 Oct, 2005:

I just realized that this will (most likely) make possible something I was thinking of a long time ago: fading in wrinkle bumpmaps (like at the corners of eyes) together with a facial expression with ease. *does a little dance* Now I’m even happier :D

Great guys… !!!
Hope all the results of this development will be reflected in a comprehensive user guide… :’-(
It’s nice to see how Blender development continue without pauses.
This feature is great and Elbeem Fluid Simulator simply rocks!

JOongle, Forget about it! The big companies can’t take Blender.
Blender is the property of the BF, is it not? So no shares to buy there.
Blender is GPL, and like Steve Balmer said a few years ago : “…Open Source is a cancer…”
Why is it a cancer? If I understood it correctly, using GPL’ed code in your commercial code will turn your commercial code into GPL code. Maya and Max has nothing to fear from Blender. They have more programmers (…for now). Open Office stands alone also…else M$ would had destroyed it years ago (can you beieve the balls on those Open Office guys? .doc, .xls, .ppt support etc).
I think GPL is solid, as long the Blender coders don’t steal/ use commercial code.

Tom Musgrove said on 4 Oct, 2005:

Toon Scheur,

[QUOTE]If I understood it correctly, using GPL’ed code in your commercial code will turn your commercial code into GPL code.[/QUOTE]

That is a common misconception – what it does is make the company an infringer of the GPL copyright. One frequently agreed upon rememdy for such infringment is to release the commercial code under the GPL.

[QUOTE]Maya and Max has nothing to fear from Blender. [/QUOTE]

They might have more than you think – many users don’t need the full feature set of Maya, Max, XSI, etc. If Blender meets the needs of 80% of users, and offers transparent interoperability for the rest, then they stand to lose a big chuck of future software purchases.

Right now they are keeping dominance due to being more feature rich than alternatives and already being deeply entrenched in the pipelines of large studios.

However with the advent of Collada (ie a strongly supported open format) integrating other software into the pipeline will be much easier and transparent. Studios are looking at (or have) changing their modeling and texturing pipeline (Modo and ZBrush) and also rendering pipeline. Blender could start giving good reasons to change the animation pipeline.

Also all of the new animation studios that are looking at tools non movie development (game studios, tv studios, architectual studios, etc) are getting a very viable option.

[QUOTE]I think GPL is solid, as long the Blender coders don’t steal/ use commercial code.[/QUOTE]

Stealing code is a copyright violation – which is unlikely to occur. The real concern is over patent violations, which are difficult to predict since the patent offices frequently allow even trivial software ideas to be patented. (Being in europe gives some protection since software patents are not valid in europe yet, but we don’t know how long that will last)

It is good to be cautious to an extent I think, but I doubt that anyone is going to sue blender over drivers; they might as well sue over polygons! It is a feature that is in all of the major 3d suites in some shape or form, and in a few of the minor ones too. They all call it something slightly different and represent it in different ways, but it seems a trivial (and extremely useful) idea. blender doesn’t copy anyone’s implementation that I know of- it feels like doing it in the IPO window is a very blendery way.

Quoting “Stealing code is a copyright violation – which is unlikely to occur. The real concern is over patent violations, which are difficult to predict since the patent offices frequently allow even trivial software ideas to be patented. (Being in europe gives some protection since software patents are not valid in europe yet, but we don’t know how long that will last)”

I agree.

Auteuro said on 4 Oct, 2005:

Patent blah-blah-blah aside for now… :)

I hope it’s becoming obvious to everyone how important the Orange project is to Blender development. What better way to figure out what Blender REALLY needs to get serious animation done than to actually do a serious movie project? All the new features are like several dreams becoming reality after years of longing for them.

I know that, just pointing out I started a discussion on an off-topic issue :)

Toon Scheur said on 4 Oct, 2005:

About those new animation innovations in Blender.. .
Can anyone say how it will compare to other packages? Like Animation Master? Or Animonium? Or even Marionette/ Gepetto (from Pixar…that is if anybody know its specs)?
I keep hearing that Animonium is the closest thing to black magic, but that could very well be the marketing departing jiving away.
Those new animation system in Blender has been the most visible/ ground breaking changes since the GUI overhaul. Normally you hear people talk about Blender as if it is a modelling app. But I think people will be talking about Blender with more enfasis on animation.

Tom Musgrove said on 4 Oct, 2005:

[QUOTE]Can anyone say how it will compare to other packages?[/QUOTE]

We should in most important respects be very comparable to the best of the character animation systems out there for the functionality that has been implemented (ie there are areas that are not in the current scope such as motion capture data and simulation based animation).

LetterRip

Toon Scheur said on 4 Oct, 2005:

OK, deleting the bookmarks to the other packages…… done.

I for now am not waiting for motion capture or synthetic animation (although it will spice up the features list) because being able to control your animation gives you more artistic freedom, where the other solutions would be excellent for games and such.

Really guys, Orange seems to be turning into a real cool thing. All the stuff that it asks you to add part of the animation rewrite is looking top-notch. I bow before you guys and tell you I’m really proud of what’s going on. I bet you are too.

Keep up the good work!

Blazer003 said on 5 Oct, 2005:

Could we get that blend file for that character. I am confused on when the dot (controller) moves up and right, it controls the right eyebrow and up and left it controls the left. Whoops, I think I may have figured it out, but it would be nice to see that blend none the less.

TroutMaskReplica said on 5 Oct, 2005:

how does one create the interface shown controlling the face in the video?

Hi TroutMaskReplica : It isn’t python! those are simple blender objects ( a mesh circle and a plane ) that are set as drivers in the IPO window for shape keys.
Blazer003: sure! I was intending to do it all along- I just want to add a couple more controllers to the file first, for moving the eyes around.
expect it sometime later today, or tommorrow at the latest.

Ok, just adding another off-topic, just to clear my last off-topic comment.
Autodesk as just bought Alias!

Davide said on 5 Oct, 2005:

All good news to the blender community!!!
do you will post the tesaer when you have finished it??

(Rui Campos: I’m also a portuguese blender user, and I must admit that I don’t know many ppl here in Portugal that use this software.
Can you tell me more about your personal movie project?
you can contact me by MSN or email: astrolabhouse@hotmail.com)

Auteuro said on 5 Oct, 2005:

Bassam: Clever! I was wondering the same thing as Trout. Thanks so much :D

To Rui and all discussing patents: I just re-read my post…ugh…sorry if I sounded disrespectful using the term, “patent blah-blah-blah”; it’s an extremely important topic. I was just momentarily overwhelmed by all the cool stuff Blender has been picking up since Project Orange started and wanted to switch topic gears for a moment so I could give some praise! I think my head is back on straight now ;)

This could be INCREDIBLE times for Blender if we all play our cards right. Judging from the “record-breaking” cgtalk thread about the “merger”, lot’s of people now consider moving to XSI.

If there ever was a time to “campaign” Blender – it would be now.

What the people need to see from Blender is:

– User to User Support (yeah we have the best community , but does the world know?)
– Individuals selling support to companies. (Coders future?)
– Familiar documentation
– Switching docs. (tutorials for switchers!)
– Information campaigns. Getting rid of the 10 biggest lies about Blender.
– Information campaigns. Pushing Blenders strengths (not the pricetag!)
– Professional support forums (still open to the general public, but with international rules, no politics, “look-ma-a-box” posts etc.

Of course…we can also do just fine about all the above “hype”, but then we’ll land on a typical “Apple-user-base”…you know…Apple OSX rocks..and are way more stable than most OS’s on this planet, but they still just cover about 2-6 % of the users on this planet – due to the “we’re happy with who we are so screw the rest attitude”.

Hm…could this thread become any more offtopic, oh well – I might as well spill my “marketing” guts. :)

Now more than EVER – the PROJECT ORANGE will be THE MOVIE
to bring attention to Blender – serious attention! People
are looking to switch now!

*gah* Can you tell I’m a bit too excited? :)

Toon Scheur said on 5 Oct, 2005:

JoOngle, you have some strong points there, and considering that you’re a ex-Max user.

To get back on track: Basam, wouldn’t it be more logical to arrange the planes and circles that drives/control the movement of the face, like a schematic face?

luckybreak said on 6 Oct, 2005:

…and for added ooh ah factor have a render of the characters face/limbs in the 3d view under the drive objects.

TroutMaskReplica said on 6 Oct, 2005:

sure would appreciate that .blend! ;)

i’m trying to set up my own driven facial animation system and while i’m having some success, we don’t all have ton roosendaal sitting by our side to explain the new features! (lucky bastard) /end jealousy

Really to push blender the biggest thing people are wary of is the lack of support. Yes, I know their are user forums and IRC chats galore. But companies/studios like to have a tech support person to call. The blender foundation should setup a group of volunteers to do just that.

If it is such a big problem that companies pay for it why not create a payable solution? Of course if anybody out there want this. (It would involve teaming up with a some new company not closely related to BF {but maybe binded by papers or sth. i don’t know}/{or not binded at all, but providing this support on it’s own, in some way contributing to blender welfare} :] )

Yeonil

Reno said on 6 Oct, 2005:

Did you ask Bill.. for some donation.
He is the biggesed funder in the world.
I`ll try if I was you!!!!! :)

Please Bill…. it also works great on your stuf.

Toon Scheur said on 6 Oct, 2005:

That support idea is not bad at all. Kinda like MySQL does it. It is open source, but for a piece of mind, you can buy licenses which also means you’ll get support.

Ok, to all those who wanted the .blend, check the original post.
as mentioned there, there are a few issues, right now the action that has the driver sits in the nla, but it seems like ‘normal’ actions override it (old nla problem) and furthermore, there are some problems with alt-r/s/g in actions.
I’ll keep you posted as to new development.

It looks (at least with my current cvs of blender), that the armature drivers aren’t working without explicitly forcing a refresh of the 3d view… I’m not sure why, either a problem with my blend or with blender- It was working earlier.
that’s why the jaw/eyelid/look controllers seem like they don’t do anything.

Thanks, Bassam. Haven’t got the build to open it yet, but I don’t care. As they say, “A .blend is worth 10,000 words”. At least I think that’s how the saying goes…??? ;D

kindzu said on 6 Oct, 2005:

im Portuguese 2
my mail is kindzu@gmail.com
(sorry for the off topic talk)
apart from that, im completelly amazed with the drivers :)))
did u know that only a month ago project messiah got a similar future? :)

ok, last comment, as the post edit shows, ton fixed the updating bug for bone drivers.

cekuhnen said on 12 Oct, 2005:

Hey guys,

you just made my morning. i just downloaded the driver test file and we had a blast creating facial expressions in seconds.

I have to get the orange movie DVD when it is finished so i could
give a presentation about blender here at my university. quite some students are interested in it and also like the way to model in it.

regarding patents, i also have heavy stones in my stomach.
wings3d was nearly squizzed, but at the end they did not sue
the programmer. i do not know if they had a silent agreement.

however i share the point that at one stage when blender gets finaly realy usefull for studios for certain tasks, or could even give users who do not need all features from maya/xsi a program for free which let them model, animate and render their work in a way they want and need to, the major 3d companies might feel threatned and try to shut down blender, while i am unsure if studios will so quickly make a switch or replace/add blender to their modeling pipeline. i think the special fx and the render engine in maya with mental ray and its plug ins are quite important. i can see the modeling part be done in blender since i render with maya in mental ray as well.

but i am curious how you would export the animation made in blender inro maya for example? i have to admit that i am not realy aware of what the open doc format is about and how much it will support (mesh, texture, bones, animation, …)

anyway i am more than excited about seeing this project develloping and having a great influence on blender!

thankx a lot

claas

etienneL said on 14 Oct, 2005:

hoho, i saw bassam model training to incorporate the Orange movie. Seem to be very motivated ! :))
Keep going on Orange team !.

[QUOTE]but i am curious how you would export the animation made in blender inro maya for example? i have to admit that i am not realy aware of what the open doc format is about and how much it will support (mesh, texture, bones, animation, …)[/QUOTE]

Currently we don’t have any robust exporters that handle all of that, however, there is a widely supported format that can handle all of that information and more and support is being written for it right now.

[QUOTE]regarding patents, i also have heavy stones in my stomach.
wings3d was nearly squizzed, but at the end they did not sue
the programmer. i do not know if they had a silent agreement.[/QUOTE]

Mirai may have had design patents which protect the ‘look and feel’ of a program – which given how closely wings3d was modeled after them could have been in violation. I don’t know what if any patents Mirai held (indeed they may not have held any and it could have been lawyer bluff, which is not uncommon).

Blender is extremely unlikely to infringe design patents, being a european foundation currently shields it from a lot of patent issues as well. According to Ton, as long as the infringement is not willful (ie as long as the Blender Foundation didn’t implement it knowing it was patented), all that could currently happen to the foundation is it is forced to recode stuff to not utilize the patent.

I read in the release notes that actions can also be driven by the movement of objects, just like IPO’s can be driven. Does anyone know how to go about doing this?

Greg Smith

PolygoneUK said on 19 Oct, 2005:

Been looking at this .blend file for a day or so now. I’m wondering if anyone out there has the time and patience to create a video tutorial on how to do the facial controls?

I can see ‘what’ they do, but have no idea how they are made to make things happen :(

alt said on 23 Oct, 2005:

Well, about this fear of suing: I don’t get it.

All the big packages (XSI, Maya, Houdini etc) implement the same features and pretty much in the same way. Still they are not suing each other, because:
a) their opponent also has wide patent portfolio
b) suing would give them bad name (they are all catering artists, after all.. artists are picky)
c) that particular stuff is *not* patented

There are not that many ideas in computer graphics that haven’t been around in academic circles for decades now. But they are getting implemented and used only lately because now there’s processing power for it.

It is very hard for me to imagine that Blender would be only tool used in a big studio and threaten the sales of Alias for example. Most of the studios code their own stuff, buy everything there is and glue it all together to get best possible result in a given time. But Blender and other free tools may cause all big providers to keep checking their prices.

rogper said on 23 Oct, 2005:

Puting aside the ipo drivers and the viewport controlers for the moment, whitch are in fact outstanding. I dont Know if someone noted the bone armature of the dude!? Well I have, and let me tell you guys that it works torifical, I stayed marveled whit the brutal amonte of them, but what reely stuneed me was the fact that, well… is just the best riging i ever seen, it realy works.
I realy want to learn the HOW TO DO, I’ve been tring reverse engenering but :-/ Tuturial Please :-)
Keep the excelente work… OHH! Sory the ortografic mustakes, it seems to be the new fashion in this reply thing so I have to say it to, I’m Portuguese.

TroutMaskReplica said on 12 Nov, 2005:

i’ve been able to reverse engineer everything in the .blend except for the movement of the eyes.

i’ve created 4 shape – lookupleft, lookupright, lookdownleft, lookdownright – and created a widget using guitargeek’s script using the 4 mix preset.

problem is, the eyeballs squash in strange ways in between the four poles.

any advice?

Janete said on 5 Apr, 2006:

Hi!!

I’m working on a project related with facil emotions. Right now I have a facial mesh with some vertex key animation. But I would like to do something like this?

How do I do it? Can someone recomend me a tutorial?
It’s really important…

Thank you!

Janete – Portugal

Mike Stramba said on 5 Apr, 2006:

Hi,

For some reason, after either keying the armature or the facial controls, some of the facial controls stop working. Specifically the jaw and look at … which I see at the top of the blog were ‘fixed’ (in the ‘controller2.blend’ file that I downloaded from this page ???)

What is the fix / workaround ……… if any ?

Mike

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